Eugene S. Robinson leaves Oxbow

Eugene S. Robinson, frontman of long-running noise-rock group Oxbow, has announced that he’s stepping away from the band. The founder and vocalist of the group posted a lengthy message on his Substack, explaining in part why he chose to bring his time with the band to an end.

Robinson writes, “While I don’t feel that my life is being threatened, my physical life, I do feel, under the weight of irreconcilable differences, none of them aesthetic or musical, that I now must leave OXBOW. Recent circumstances have caused me several dark nights of the soul and while it feels/seems crazy to kill my involvement in that which I started, I think it necessary so that maybe a kind of healing can take place that will make OXBOW a comfortable place for me to be again. If not, then not.”

He adds, cryptically, that “the very real prospect that we might have contributed to the misery of the world makes me sick to my stomach.”

The group’s last album was last year’s Love’s Holiday, which followed 2017’s Thin Black Duke.